


the hungry son

by poalimal



Series: last days of summer [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Character Study, Chinese Character, Chinese-American Character, Disconnected Family, F/M, Gen, Minor Character Death, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 05:39:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15857343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poalimal/pseuds/poalimal
Summary: 'But don't you think it's romantic?' said Chris. 'How Mom and Dad found each other, after all those years?''Sure,' said Nikki, 'the first 300 times they told us, yea.'





	the hungry son

 

 

Chow Wang Kei was serious, as a child; soft-spoken. His grandmother called him Baby for as long as she lived.

His father said he took after his mother. Sometimes he meant this as an insult to Wang Kei's brothers; sometimes he meant this as an insult to Wang Kei. It was not until he became a grandfather himself that Wang Kei's father learned how to speak to children without wounding them. Growing up, his sons could not help but love him very bitterly, Wang Kei most of all.

The last child of his mother's life, Wang Kei was not allowed to quit school and help out, no matter how he begged.

'You have a dead man's tongue,' his father told him, 'no way I'm letting you in the kitchen!'

'You have clumsy hands,' his first brother told him, 'no way I'm letting you near a knife!'

'Drop dead, dickface,' his second brother told him, 'no way I'm teaching you anything!'

So Wang Kei stopped asking. And he was a good student when he was not home: thoughtful, curious, clever. Quiet. He received a scholarship to study engineering all the way in Wuhan. He had barely told his family about it before it was decided that he would go.

His second brother told him he would look like a hick, with his stuffed-in shirts and gelled down hair. His second brother's wife told him he would look charming. His first brother told him he was never getting married, so he might as well learn how to feed himself. His first brother's wife, who sampled his congee experiments, told him... to marry a woman with a sense of humour.

His father - sweetened some, by Wang Kei's little niece and nephew - did not tell him anything. Instead he gave him a book of his mother's.

'She could not write much,' his father said, the night before he left. 'But she was like you. Always thinking.'

 

* * *

 

The book was small, battered; the binding tender. Several pages were ripped out entirely. It did not contain much more than day lists: errands to run, people to see, things like that. His mother crossed-out with a firm hand, sometimes bleeding ink through to the next page.

On the twenty-third page, small and smudged, she had asked: _Will he know me?_ The next sixteen pages had all the usual daily lists. A page or two was ripped out. And that was all. The final few pages were blank.

Wang Kei had no idea when she'd written all of it. He read the whole thing once a day for a week, and was miserably, hopelessly homesick for ten months straight in Wuhan.

He was too depressed to starch his shirts as stiffly as he liked them, and much too sad to gel down his hair. Another, less handsome man would've looked sloppy - but Wang Kei really did take after his mother. Several of his classmates found him refreshing. _Charming_ , they called him.

'And you're not even doing anything about it!' said his roommate Geng Zhi. 'If girls talked about me the way they talk about you, I would be having so much sex!'

By now Wang Kei had fallen asleep outside of his locked room six times. He had seen so much of Zhi's girlfriend Ang Ai Ling that he was physically incapable of making eye contact with her without blushing severely.

'I think you are having a lot of sex already,' Wang Kei muttered.

'Do you think it's easy?' Zhi demanded. 'Ai Ling says she can hear your sighs all the way from the hallway!' (Ai Ling also said Wang Kei was charming, but Zhi didn't share that part.)

'I am sorry,' said Wang Kei, guiltily, 'I will try to sigh more quietly from now on.'

'Ahh, that's all right,' said Zhi, clapping him hard on the shoulder. 'Just make it up to me. I told you my American cousin is coming this Friday? I won't be able to pick her up, though, 'cus of class. But you don't have anything going on, do you?'

Well, said Wang Kei, he actually had a test he needed to prepare for--

'Great!' said Zhi. 'You can borrow my car, I'll tell her what you look like.' He paused, eyeing Wang Kei critically. 'You can wear my old coat, if you like. Heard it's gonna snow.'

 

* * *

 

It did snow, the day he met Wong Hoi Ki. But it was not the cold that he remembered.

He remembered her smile; the way his heart lit up within him when he saw it for the very first time. The gloved finger she pointed at herself. The crick he got in his neck, bending down close to hear. Her voice when she laughed and said, 'I'm Hannah.'

 _Ha-nnah, Han-nah, Hh-nhh_ \- a song that got stuck in his chest.

Hannah spoke Cantonese badly, Mandarin worse, and could barely understand his English. Her laugh sounded like a car that wouldn't start. She had cut her hair herself in her toilet back home, and it showed. She was in her junior year, pre-med, engaged to be married, and Wang Kei was in love. He surprised himself, that week, with all the ways he found to make her laugh that required no spoken language.

And yet, if not by accident, the two of them never touched. He felt like a shivering beast whenever she was near: he could not help watching her with his whole body. He swallowed every word she said whole, even the ones he didn't understand. He spoke with her for hours and hours each night, told her everything he knew about himself, and even things he had not known. About his father, his brothers. His mother.

He didn't know if she understood him. He knew he understood the crinkle in her cheek, when she laughed.

He thought-- he thought he might make her happy.

Ai Ling thought he was sweet. Zhi thought he was disgusting. And it didn't matter what Wang Kei thought about it, really - at the end of the week, Hannah went back home to California and left him no number, no address. No kind of promise.

And why should she promise him anything? Wang Kei's heart wasn't hers to break. He shook the whole thing off with surprising ease - he had forgotten, being so homesick, what it felt like to wake up with a smile - and started seeing a girl, Luo Na, in his same department.

She was a very serious woman, Na. He couldn't make her laugh, at least. They graduated, together; went to Zhi and Ai Ling's wedding, together; found a flat near his job in the city, together.

He took her back home when his second brother died. Chi Kei had never liked him much, but Wang Kei had always thought-- he had always hoped--

It was sudden, is all. It was hot, that spring, and rainy. The train was faster than he remembered.

He had not come to Foshan in years. And that spring, the spring of his second brother's death, Na tucked tight against his side, he understood why. Na never said a single word against his hometown - and yet he felt ashamed, showing her this part of him. His family, his father, his first--his only brother. His sisters-in-law, strangers-in-blood. All his knobby-kneed nieces and nephews. The tiny, too-cramped house; their restaurant that had seemed so much bigger, when he was a child. The scent of oil that seeped into his suit.

Wang Kei and Na returned to Wuhan together, apart. He had never cast anyone out of his heart before. She did not give him a chance to try.

Their last night together, she said: 'Wang Kei, I have never asked for love from you. But I had thought that I could at least come to expect kindness.'

 

* * *

 

He had not known that so many of their things... had belonged to Na alone. The paintings on the wall. The pots; pans. Baby, who begged for treats whenever the door opened.

When Na left, she took it all with her.

 

* * *

 

Wang Kei went to work in a daze. His boss, a shrewd, almost paranoiac man, assumed he was being poached.

'What,' he asked him one night, 'do you think about going to America?'

Wang Kei thought his boss was just drunk. He was unmarried, after all: he did not presume that such opportunities would come to him easily. 'I think it would be a very good opportunity,' he said carefully, 'for a strong member of the team.'

'Oh, our Chow Wang Kei is so humble!' his colleagues said, laughing. Wang Kei laughed, too. The joke was that they found him arrogant.

Their boss didn't have much of a sense of humour. 'He is very humble,' he agreed. 'I think he will represent our company very well.'

So it was decided. Wang Kei would be sent to meet members of their American branch. He would participate in a few trainings, deepen the company relationship, and (his boss hoped) give up any ideas of moving to another, perhaps better-paying, company.

While the lawyers took care of his papers, Wang Kei sent Zhi a quick message. He remembered that Zhi and Ai Ling had moved to the States, a few years back, to be closer to family.

 _I will be in San Francisco in a month's time, on the following dates_ , he wrote. _Perhaps I can come see you? Let me know. My address has changed, I have written it below_.

No need for so much space, anymore; not when he lived alone.

 

* * *

 

If it was hot in Wuhan in June, at least it was rainy, too. San Francisco was hot and dry like demon's breath, ready to suck the wet from your bones.

Well - at least there was a wind! Wang Kei thought when he arrived, tired and overwarm. It was not his first work trip abroad. Still, he did not think he would ever get used to the plane rides: the crumpling of his sense of space and time, the up-ending of his inner ear and stomach, the fumbling for meaning on a slippery tongue.

He looked around hopelessly for the driver the company was supposed to send. He tried to make himself look more like he thought George Chow might look: cold, quiet, arrogant. What his colleagues must think of him all the time.

And then he saw her.

She waved to him, quickly, her face pink all over from the heat. Her hair was longer, lovely. She was very tan.

She wore a skirt. No ring.

'Hello!' she said, in passable Cantonese, 'you may not remember me, we met-- God, years ago-- my cousin is Geng Zhi, he sent me to meet you, my name is Wong Hoi Ki--'

'Hannah,' he said. The song he had never forgotten. He spoke to her in English: 'I remember you.'

 

* * *

 

'You know,' she said the next morning, over congee, 'if I'd known you could cook, all those years ago, I probably would've never gone home.'

He laughed. 'I couldn't always,' he admitted. 'I've always taken more after my mother.'

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> \- I am very far out of my lane with this! Really begging for informed critical feedback here.  
> \- Some notes on names:  
> >>Chow Wang Kei is meant to be a Cantonese name, _Chow_ being the family name, and the two names _Wang Kei_ serving as the given name. Geng Zhi is related to Hannah Wong (Wong Hoi Ki) through his mother's family, who come from Guangzhou.  
>  >>Ang Ai Ling, Zhi's girlfriend and later wife, is Chinese Singaporean.  
> >>Don't get too attached to these names lol. If someone tells me that any of these names are too unusual or old-fashioned, I will definitely change them. Btw, if you notice that any of these names are too unusual or old-fashioned... please tell me so I can change them lol.  
> \- Wuhan University, where Wang Kei studied engineering, does have student housing/accommodation, but I cannot tell if this is a recent feature, or if it is only for international students.  
> \- Wang Kei's grandmother would not have called him 'baby', as in English. Probably she would have called him bao bao (which I understand is written as 寶寶 or 宝宝?). Ditto for Na's li'l dog.  
> \- Foshan isn't that far from Guangzhou (also known as Canton). Foshan seems to be considered comparatively smaller, more sedate? Plenty of wealthy people out there too, though.  
> \- I kept the timeline in this intentionally vague. Please note that I am utterly ill-equipped to write about how the Cultural Revolution would've affected Chow Wang Kei, a not-poor kid growing up in China after the 60's, and his family.  
> \- June seems to be a pretty mild month, weather wise, in SF. Not so much these days.  
> \- Luo Na falls in love with someone who makes her laugh.


End file.
